Giving Compass' Take:

• Education Dive talks with school administrators about their experiences implementing personalized learning and some common issues they have noticed are often overlooked.  

• Rigorous assessment and better training are among the missing pieces discussed here. How can nonprofits in the education sector help fill in the gaps with funding?

• Here's more on how we can prepare teachers for personalized learning. 

If you asked administrators to name the three buzzwords they've heard most in the past five years, "personalized learning" would probably be among the most common. The approach is certainly not without merit, showing significant results in school models like the private and Montessori systems — but scaling that approach has proven to be challenging in traditional schools, where class sizes tend to be much larger and much greater federal accountability around assessment and results exists.

To gain more insight into the challenges of adopting a personalized approach, Education Dive asked school and district leaders what they see as the most overlooked aspect of personalization when schools and districts adopt these models. Here's what they had to say.

Richard Gordon — Principal, Paul Robeson High School (Pennsylvania)
[Recognizing] the importance of trauma-informed education and teachers employing, practicing and insisting that students exhibit social-emotional intelligence in our community on a daily basis. Public education, prevention and intervention, early identification, and effective trauma treatment within the school environment are all necessary to break the cycle of apathy and indifference to the importance of education that exists in a lot of our schools.

Scott Baytosh — Head of School, Alexandria Country Day School (Virginia)
I believe one of the most overlooked aspects of personalized learning is assessment. As a culture, we tend to have a strong bias toward "fairness" in grading and assessment, and this is typically expressed by treating every child the same through purely quantitative measures.

Read the full article about overlooked aspects of personalized learning by Roger Riddell at Education Dive.